Uncasual thoughts

meditations on the new federalist papers eh?

In King of Attolia, Costis is very clear that he's pretty average. He lets the reader know consistently that other people in the guard are more attractive or better swordsmen. He seems to be the epitome of Just Some Guy.

In Thick as Thieves, Kamet needs you to know that Costis glows in the sun. Costis is so pretty everyone wants to sleep with him or assumes everyone else wants to sleep with him. Costis is so strong he beats an elite team of highly trained fighters. Costis's rippling muscles glisten with sweat. Etc.

And it's a great reminder of one of the central storytelling conceits of the books, which is that there's no such thing as an objective narrator. Everyone is to some degree unreliable.

Costis is very humble and also kind of oblivious. He's shocked to learn that apparently everyone has tacitly agreed he's the natural successor to Teleus. We can't really trust him to tell us if he is in any way exceptional.

Kamet, on the other hand, is thirsty and in denial. He's lying to himself about his own attraction to Costis, and convincing himself it's just some kind of journalistic integrity to tell the reader what Costis's muscles are doing in any given situation. We can't really trust him either.

“True enough. But does a good man let his circumstances determine his character?”

I agree that migration shouldn't be made harder. It should be much easier and safer. But that sentiment, while decent, doesn't go deep enough. The real goal shouldn't just be making the journey safer; it should be making people's home countries safe so they never have to flee at all.

The fact that the United States is a place people flee *to*, and the fact that people are forced to flee *from* their homes, are not separate problems. They are cause and effect. The second happens largely because of the first.

Let me give a simplified but structurally accurate example, and I'll walk through exactly why the misery is profitable. Picture a giant U.S.-based fruit company operating in an imperialized Latin American country. With the backing of the U.S. government, it helps overthrow popular leaders, supports the torture and murder of activists, and installs a brutal comprador regime, a local ruling class that serves foreign interests in exchange for a cut of the spoils. In return, that regime rewrites the laws so the company can operate with near-zero costs for labor and safety.

Why is this so profitable? Otherwise, a company has to pay decent wages, provide insurance, maintain safe facilities, and properly handle toxic chemicals. Those are all costs. Under the puppet regime, the company can legally pay workers a few cents an hour, far below survival level. It can skip insurance entirely. It doesn't need to spend on safety equipment because if a worker is injured or killed, the company has no legal liability. It can spray pesticides from the air straight onto workers and nearby communities, causing cancer and birth defects, and face zero consequences. Instead of paying to manage toxic waste, it simply dumps it. Every one of these horrors is, in cold accounting terms, a cost eliminated.

The result is fruit produced at a tiny fraction of its real cost. The company ships that fruit back to the imperial country and sells it cheap in supermarkets. Because the price is low, it captures huge market share. The gap between the crushed production costs and the selling price, even a low one, is enormous. That gap is superprofit, profit so large it would be impossible without extreme exploitation backed by state violence.

The chain is simple: imperial state violence installs a puppet regime, that regime eliminates worker protections, labor and safety costs plummet, production becomes dirt cheap, goods sell cheaply in the imperial core and seize markets, and the profit margin swells far beyond normal returns.

Crucially, those cheap goods don't only benefit the company. They flow into the imperial country's economy, keeping prices low for consumers. Ordinary working people in the U.S. can fill their shopping carts with affordable fruit, coffee, clothing, and electronics. That material benefit, cheap goods bought with foreign blood, helps build consent for the entire arrangement. Some working people in the imperial core can feel a small stake in the system because their cost of living is subsidized by misery in the imperialized world. This actively undermines solidarity between working people across borders, because the system makes it seem like their interests are opposed.

Now back to the imperialized country. Because a repressive government has been installed, groups that were already vulnerable face even sharper abuse. Then, in a truly vicious twist, this doesn't just make those people more vulnerable to both local and foreign exploitation, but also creates instability and social breakdown that the company and its regime create are later held up as reasons for more imperial intervention. "Look at the savages, we have to step in." The very wounds inflicted by foreign corporate power are used to justify further domination.

This isn't just about fruit. It's the pattern for whole economies. So what happens next? Some people reach a breaking point and try to flee toward the imperial centers that helped destroy their homes. Many die trying. Their desperation isn't random. The imperial country is a wealthier place to live *because* the imperialized country has been made poorer. The high standard of living in the imperial core and the destitution of the imperialized periphery are produced by the same machine.

When migrants do arrive, if they survive, they are slotted straight back into exploitation. They become a vulnerable, easily threatened workforce, undocumented, unable to demand fair pay or safe conditions, always deportable. The restaurant owner who clawed his way to stability is one of the lucky ones. Many are funneled into dangerous industries, trafficked, sexually assaulted, or worked in conditions no citizen would tolerate. This is not a glitch; it is a design feature. The imperial economy needs a layer of desperate, exploitable labor. The migrant escapes exploitation in an imperialized country only to be fed into a new form of it in the imperial country, which they endure because, compared to the engineered desperation back home, it is still the lesser evil for many- though kidnappings are also common.

This is why simply demanding "make immigration safer" runs into a structural wall. The current imperialist order needs migrants to be a vulnerable category. Even if some reforms soften the edges for a few, the migrant's function as cheap, precarious labor remains locked in. And the fundamental question still towers over everything: Why did they have to uproot their lives and risk death in the first place? Even if the destination were made more humane, is it acceptable that entire regions are deliberately kept miserable so their people have no choice but to leave? What about the millions who cannot flee, left to live in the wreckage?

The real answer isn't to manage the pain more kindly or to tinker with immigration rules. It is to remove the need to flee altogether. But here we must be absolutely clear. This system is not a malfunction of an otherwise decent capitalism. The superprofits that flow to the imperial core depend directly on the immiseration of the imperialized world. The entire machinery of imperialism, the puppet regimes, the labor aristocracies, the reserve armies of migrant labor, exists because capital accumulation across borders requires it. You cannot reform this away with nicer trade deals, better labor standards, or friendlier immigration policies. Capital will always break or co-opt those reforms because its core drive for superprofit demands a hierarchy of nations. It is also part of a reason why we are currently seeing more immigrants drowned in Europe, more put into camps and treated even worse globally including in the US

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

which is insane behaviour!!!! but costis is so confident in his understanding of hierarchy, and so staunch in his belief in its value, that he will enforce it by any means necessary — not because he wants to change the system, but because he wants his and others’ place in it to mean something worthwhile. gen leans on costis to move teleus and costis leans right back to force gen into revealing himself as a true annux and, by extension, a leader worthy of attolia’s (but also specifically costis’s) loyalty

Mining could be done in ways that aren't deleterious to human and ecological health but people don't do it that way because of the expenses. The refining of the ore - often initial steps done on site before being sent for enrichment - is the real killer because it produces vast amounts of chemical runoff that most companies and states have just historically dumped somewhere as the cost of further processing it for safe disposal is deemed uneconomical.